Governor of Iran’s Central Bank (CBI) has slammed plots for devaluing the country’s national currency as rial keeps regaining some of its value despite increasing economic pressure from the US and the Persian Gulf tensions over the recent weeks.
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Abdolnasser Hemmati said on Friday that “enemies” failed to realize their objectives from imposing sanctions on Iran which was “as they had asserted to destroy the national currency as a prelude to overthrow the state.”
Hemmati’s comments on Instagram came amid reports that the rial had resumed its long-anticipated recovery against the US dollar on Thursday as it traded 118,000 against the greenback, a surge of around 13 percent compared to earlier in July when each dollar had been sold for 135,000 Iranian rials.
“Today, me and my colleagues in the CBI are proud that we have had a tiny share in the all-out resistance and victory of the Iranian people against this big plot (which came) in one of the most sensitive periods of the country’s history,” said Hemmati.
The official, however, admitted that US sanctions had caused difficulties for the Iranian households through the shocks they created in the markets and the increased inflation that followed.
Iran has been faced with some of the harshest sanctions ever imposed on a country after US President Donald Trump withdrew from a major international agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program in May last year.
The sanctions began in November and were toughened in May this year after Trump’s administration cancelled waivers granted to several major buyers of Iran’s oil.
Trump has stated repeatedly that sanctions would finally force the Iranians to bow, claiming that people in the country have had huge difficulties finding foods and medicine.
However, official data released by the government this week showed that consumer inflation had started to decline in the month ending July 22.
The surge of the Iranian rial and the declined inflation comes despite renewed military tensions in the Persian Gulf where Iran has refused to release a British tanker it seized last Friday. The incident, which Iran linked to the tanker's carelessness for maritime rules, came two weeks after Britain seized an Iranian supertanker in its overseas territory of Gibraltar.
